Field
The disclosed embodiments generally relate to techniques for accessing an online content-management system. More specifically, the disclosed embodiments relate to a technique for managing a local cache on a computing device for an online content-management system.
Related Art
Online content-management systems such as the Dropbox™ service that is offered by Dropbox, Inc., of San Francisco, Calif., are quite useful because they enable users to access their online content from a number of different computing devices, including mobile devices. Unfortunately, network connections from mobile devices are often slow and unreliable. This makes it challenging for an online content-management system to provide reasonable performance while retrieving large content items, such as photographs and video clips, from a mobile device.
This performance problem can be addressed by storing commonly accessed content items in a local cache on the mobile device, which greatly improves access speed and also makes it possible to work offline when a network connection is unavailable. However, there are resource limitations on a mobile device, such as a smartphone, which makes it hard to cache more than a small number of content items on a mobile device. Hence, the key to achieving adequate access performance while retrieving content items from a mobile device is to accurately determine what content items will be most relevant to the user in the near future, so that these relevant content items can be prefetched and stored in the local cache on the mobile device.